Training the Senses: Body Language

Date: June 8th
Time: 8 – 10 PM
With: Ike Kamphof and Ruud Hendriks
Location: Misericordeplein, Maastricht
Language: English spoken

How can we attain knowledge of our bodily action and reflexes through the study of people who are extra sensitive to the wordless behavior of others? Ike Kamphof presents various possibilities of sensory existence and co-existence by exploring rhythms, mimetic mirroring and sensory details. These all play a large role in our daily, largely silent and subconscious interaction. Ruud Hendriks studies clowns specializing in dementia care, who seek to help people with this condition retain their sensory and emotional being in the world. He focuses on clowning as a technique to become extra-sensitive to the subtle, wordless expressions of persons with dementia. Training the Senses helps the clown go along with the patients and become attuned to their ways of being in the world. The clown also tries to find access to hidden capacities in people with dementia to stay sensitive and receptive to outside stimuli.

Training the Senses: Body Language 1 — Photo: Sacha Ruland

Ruud Hendriks

Ruud Hendriks (1961) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He studies artistic projects pertaining to people suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s disease. For this research, he was trained as a miMakkus clown, which involved learning to make contact with very simple gestures, body language and mimicry on a ground zero-based experience or expectation level.

Ike Kamphof

Ike Kamphof (1959) is a philosopher and works in the Faculty of Arts and Culture at Maastricht University. She studies the role of media and technologies in care networks. In her recent book, Iedereen Voyeur (Everybody is a Voyeur, 2013), she explores our relationship to the world and to each other as expressed in ways of looking. Countering dominant views of the human being as a detective-scientist who strives to map the world by overseeing it, she focuses on embodied, multisensory ways of perceiving the world. The latter do not separate the viewer from what she sees, but transform them both.